Haiti earthquake: 10,000 buried each day in mass graves

Bulldozers and earth movers are being used to bury the bodies of 10,000 earthquake victims every day in mass graves carved into the hills north of Port-au-Prince.

A UN truck takes bodies to a makeshift graveyard, in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince Photo: REUTERS

A UN truck takes bodies to a makeshift graveyard, in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince Photo: REUTERS

An estimated 90,000 people have so far been buried since disaster struck last Tuesday and, according to official estimates, another 110,000 corpses are still to be recovered from the wreckage of Haiti’s capital.

Convoys of dumper trucks bring a continuous flow of bodies to Titanyen, a sparsely populated wasteland north of the capital, from streets and ruins pervaded by the stench of rotting human remains trapped beneath collapsed buildings.

Foultone Fequiert, 38, one of the burial workers, said that he, and others, had been traumatised by their macabre task.

“I have seen so many children, so many children. I cannot sleep at night and, if I do, it is a constant nightmare,” he said. “I received 10,000 bodies yesterday alone.”

Workers have no time to give the dead proper religious burials or to hear pleas that bodies be buried in shallow graves from which loved ones might eventually retrieve them.

“We just dump them in, and fill it up,” said Luckner Clerzier, 39.

There are at least 15 burial mounds, each covering a wide trench cut 25 feet into the ground and rising 15 feet into the air.

Limbs of dead men, women and children have been left sticking out at all angles from the tall mounds of chalky dirt.

At a larger mass grave site, three earth-moving machines were at work yesterday cutting long trenches into the earth readying them for more cadavers.

Medecins Sans Frontieres warned the death toll could rise even higher, on top of those killed in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, as untreated injuries fester and as makeshift refugee camps breed disease.

“The next health risk could include outbreaks of diarrhoea, respiratory tract infections and other diseases among hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in overcrowded camps with poor or nonexistent sanitation,” said Dr Greg Elder.

Tens of thousands remain seriously injured in makeshift field hospitals set up around Port-au-Prince and gangrene has begun to eat its way through many wounds in the tropical heat.

Doctors, lacking supplies and modern equipment, have already carried out countless amputations to save victims with serious crush wounds or to repair internal injuries.

“We carried out 30 operations on Tuesday. In the previous six days we have cared for more than 1,000 Haitians,” said Thierry Allafort Duverger, a French doctor working in the suburb of Petionville.

A 1,000-bed capacity US naval hospital ship moored off Haiti yesterday and begun taking on board the worst of the injured in a bid to cut the growing number of casualties.

Daniel Rincon, a Colombian doctor working with the Red Cross, said that surgeons were carrying out an average of about 50 amputations a day.

“Maybe 300 people have lost a leg or foot or some part of their body. Our surgeons have been working 24 hours a day,” he said.

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